NYSIA Panel

So I went to the New York Software Industry Association panel on Monday. They had three very interesting panelists: David Teten of Nitron Advisors, Laurel Touby of Media Bistro and Carter Burden of Logicworks. (The panel was moderated by the NYSIA president - Bruce E. Berstein).

I didn't really go in with the intent of "covering" the event, so my notes are pretty helter skelter, but here are a couple of points that really stood out for me:

Offshore

I thought we'd get the controversial stuff out in the open first. David said you should try to offshore as many parts of your business as possible. In fact, he apparently has a huge team in India scanning ads looking for resources. The qualified leads get passed up to the North American offices.

Board of Advisors

All three panelists had a board of advisors of sorts. David had a fairly large board, he had specific time commitments that he required of each board member, and conditions under which they would be fired. Laurel defined her board as "people she needed to talk to at that moment". Carter's board was made up of his investors: his family. Eek. I was struck by how much each panelists personality shaped the nature of the way they did business: David was incredibly organized, Laurel was social and Carter was familial. (Of course that's a massive over-simplification...)

Equity

All three panelists had some sort of employee equity program. In each case the total equity devoted to the program was less than 10%, and while each panelist liked it for its ability to align the interests of the employees with the company, they cautioned that a large equity grant doesn't necessarily get you someone as emotionally invested in the business as the founder.

Partners

The meaning of "partners" seemed to shift around a bit. Initially it seemed like the panelists were taking it to mean other businesses in a peer relationship with the founder's business. In this case there was a fair amount of negative feedback from the panelists about the idea. Laurel frankly said she hated partners - she had a technology partner early on and it was a disaster. Partnership was characterized as an inherently unequal arrangement, where one side cares more about the partnership than the other. Danger, Wil Robinson.

Attracting Customers

There were some fairly conventional answers to attracting customers - Google Adwords etc. David put something well however: "Creation of valuable intellectual property for clients". By making his website a valuable resource for clients, it attracted the kind of people that were likely to bring him business.

Interns

This is something which I was sort of aware of, but hadn't really thought of the scale. New York would collapse into sand without interns - they are the donated labor that keeps everything running. At AI we have a couple of interns, but business seem to be churning through legions of them to do stuff. David and Laurel spoke of "employing" (as in, for free) lots of interns, which is the only way they managed to get stuff done.